“When I pushed in 2009 to advance the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act,” says Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, “it was Sessions who sought to derail it.”
Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, writes Leahy in a January 8 Boston Globe editorial, “asserted at a Judiciary Committee hearing on the bill that he was ‘not sure women or people with different sexual orientations face that kind of discrimination.'”
In other words, Trump’s appointee for U.S. Attorney General denied the existence of hate crimes targeting people on the basis of sexual orientation or gender. And so Sessions worked to fight a bill that offered protections against these crimes as well as those motivated by bias against race, religion and even disability.
Fast forward to 2017 and Sessions scores 0% on Human Rights Campaign’s latest Congressional Scorecard, which measures support for equal rights. (More on Sessions from HRC.)
Senate confirmation hearings for Sessions begin tomorrow, Tuesday, January 10.
In his editorial, Leahy quotes the late Senator Edward Kennedy, who said before a 1986 committee where Sessions stood as a nominee to be a district court judge:
Mr. Sessions is a throwback to a shameful era which I know both black and white Americans thought was in our past. It is inconceivable to me that a person of this attitude is qualified to be a US attorney, let alone a US federal judge. He is, I believe, a disgrace to the Justice Department and he should withdraw his nomination and resign his position.
Sessions was rejected by that 1986 Republican-controlled hearing. As Leahy points out, “He was too extreme for Republicans in 1986. Now that he is nominated to be attorney general, we will see if the same person is still too extreme for Republicans [now].”
Adds the Vermont Senator:
Sessions has repeatedly stood in the way of efforts to promote and protect Americans’ civil rights. He did so even as other members of the Republican Party sought to work across the aisle to advance the cause of living up to our nation’s core values of equality and justice, just as Kennedy did so many times. …
If we are to continue being a great nation, then survivors of sexual assault and hate crimes and religious bigotry all deserve to know that their civil and human rights will be protected by the attorney general of the United States. Given the divisive rhetoric of the Republican nominee for president last year, many are worried.
Tuesday marks the first public hearing to consider a nominee to the president-elect’s cabinet. I like to think that Ted Kennedy’s presence will be in the room named for him. I hope the American people will tune in.
